Today on the LHC's 17-mile long track on the Franco-Swiss border, researchers powered up the particle collider to a combined energy of 7 TeV, an incredible amount of power not seen packed into single particles since our universe's early days. (Source: Mark Dowe's Journal)

Renowned British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking surveys the LHC. It will take physicists like Hawking years of research to use the data collected at the LHC to unlock the secrets of the universe. (Source: CERN)

Collider is operating at unbelievable levels of power

There's
an enormous amount of energy inside a single atom. Unleashing
this energy has flattened cities and today provides 20
percent of our nation's power. But what if you could pack
even more energy into a single proton, one of the positively charged
particles that makes up the atom's nucleus?

That's what
researchers at CERN have done with their Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). The LHC accelerates protons with energies above 1 TeV --
equivalent to taking the energy from the 1023to
1024 atoms in
a mosquito and putting it all in a single proton.

Now the LHC
is powering up even more in preparation to unlock some of the
universe's most puzzling mysteries.

The LHC first
activated in September of 2008, but the ecstasy of the
scientific community quickly turned to agony when an expensive
malfunction lead to over a year of repairs. Last
August those repairs wrapped
up and in November the accelerator was brought
back online. On November 30, 2009 it set
the world record for particle collision energy, smashing
together two proton beams with energies of 1.18 TeV, for a combined
collision of 2.36 TeV.

Today researchers at the LHC have
tripled that collision energy, powering the beams up to 3.5
TeV each for a combined power of 7 TeV. That much energy has
not been seen in particles since the days of the Big Bang -- the dawn
of our universe.

Even with the repairs, this was a
daunting task, worthy of some of the world's brightest minds.
States CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve
Myers, "With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of
launching the LHC physics programme. But we’ve still got a lot of
work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge
in itself: it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and
getting them to collide half way."

CERN Director General
Rolf Heuer cautioned, "The LHC is not a turnkey machine. The
machine is working well, but we’re still very much in a
commissioning phase and we have to recognize that the first attempt
to collide is precisely that. It may take hours or even days to get
collisions."

However, the researchers' persistence paid
off. The collisions started at 8:30 CEST and by 13:06
CEST they achieved the world's first 7 TeV collision.

Where
does dark energy come from? Are the forces of the
universe all manifestations of a single unified force?

The
LHC's high energy collisions may eventually answer some of these
questions. However, it will take years of analysis for
physicists to put them in context. They are already working on
the over 1 million collisions recorded at the LHC in 2009. Data
from these collisions has been spread out across a computer grid,
after being collected by the LHC's sensor packages -- ALICE, ATLAS,
CMS and LHCb.

Among the researchers' first
priorities is to "re-discover" known Standard Model
particles, such as electrons, photons, and quarks. Then they
can turn their attention to the hunt for exotic particles like the
theorized Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God Particle" by some
in research community.

A webcast of the day's events is
available to the general public here.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

You have the quack theory wrong. It was that collisions would generate microscopic black holes which would fall to the earth's interior and, in a few months or years, eat enough mass to destroy the planet.